Ike Pigott – Social Media Explorerhttps://socialmediaexplorer.com
Exploring the World of Social Media from the Inside OutTue, 26 Sep 2017 14:58:01 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.8.2113022199Google – Let me be MEhttps://socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/google-let-me-be-me-2/
https://socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/google-let-me-be-me-2/#commentsFri, 08 Nov 2013 11:00:14 +0000http://socialmediaexp.wpengine.com/?p=23426I want to like Google. I really do. But it is getting increasingly frustrating for both individuals and businesses to establish an online identity that is consistent across all platforms. Let me explain my pain....read more

But it is getting increasingly frustrating for both individuals and businesses to establish an online identity that is consistent across all platforms.

Let me explain my pain.

The I’s Have It

My name is Isaac Pigott. It has been since I was born. It will continue to be, unless I happen to witness a gangland murder, or stumble across evidence that forces me into the Witness Protection Program. (Which may be a fate worse than death for those who use social media.)

Years ago, while working in television, I was asked to change my name. It is far more common than you would know — but as it turns out, I was already well-known within the surrounding community, so there was no way they could touch the “Pigott” part (and we all know how unpleasant touching Pigott parts can be…).

However, it was not a stretch to get “Ike” out of “Isaac.” It was the opposite of a stretch — it was a punchier, friendlier-sounding name. I was told that I would be cashing Ike’s checks, so Ike I became.

At home, I am still Isaac.
On the phone with friends from school, I am Isaac.
When they phone rings and they ask for “Ike,” I know it’s someone from my post-1996 life.

So I am Isaac, but many, many more people know me as Ike. And that’s okay too, because the bank has never forced me to do a d/b/a.

Split Personalities

Isaac and Ike are functionally equivalent, and lo and behold, I am the same person. However, since many more people are inclined to look for “Ike,” that is the name I use across my social profiles. I am ikepigott on Twitter, on Tumblr, on WordPress, on Blogger, on Facebook, and on a host of social networks that I don’t even talk about using.

So now Google comes along, and offers to simplify my life. I no longer have to tell people that I’m 116389048565881346695. No, I have been pre-approved for the following:

Google wants me to be Isaac Pigott. Which I am. But I want to be known as Ike. So here are my options:

I was concerned about clicking to accept “Isaac,” thinking I could later edit it and take another. It’s a good thing I didn’t, because it appears that Google will allow you to customize your capitalization only. So congratulations to JaSoN fALLs and JAY keLLy, your wishes have come true.

Organizations Still Suffer

Think it will be any easier on the brand and organizational side? Think again.

We have a YouTube channel for our company. Every few days when we log in, Google “helpfully suggests” that maybe we could connect with more people if we used a real, personal name. The name of the person who created the account.

Because, you know, when sharing information about renewable energy and energy efficiency, you want to turn to the name of a person you’ve never heard of.

Because, you know, when people are looking for a video tutorial on sharing calendars in Outlook 2013, they want to hear it straight from Steve Ballmer.

Because, you know, when looking for breaking news on stupid things people have done on Twitter, they would never think about looking for @Mashable, because @PeteCashmore makes more sense.

What makes matters worse is that Google appears to be changing the wording and the defaults and the button placement for the pop-up box that “invites” me to convert my company to somebody’s actual name. And there is no going back.

This is all to be expected. If Google is going to make hay with Authorship as the new coin of the realm in this brave new world of Content!, then you need to connect the dots of the various Joneses and Smiths out there. But there are serious implications for branding when you’re now stuck with the name and face of a real person who might or might not be with your company tomorrow. When that person leaves, do they get your whole channel?

This is madness. And it being Google, there is a wonderful resource available. Just dive into the Google Groups, where you can find hundreds of people whose similar questions have also not been answered.

Is there a workaround that does not involve a massive advertising buy with Google, to get you an actual name on the inside?

]]>https://socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/google-let-me-be-me-2/feed/523426Social Media and Pre-teens [VIDEO]https://socialmediaexplorer.com/media-journalism/social-media-and-pre-teens/
https://socialmediaexplorer.com/media-journalism/social-media-and-pre-teens/#respondFri, 11 Oct 2013 10:00:15 +0000http://socialmediaexp.wpengine.com/?p=22955Today’s pre-teen has an instinctual understanding of the value of social networking, which is a good thing. It speaks to the way these networks are designed and to the user experience — that it is...read more

]]>Today’s pre-teen has an instinctual understanding of the value of social networking, which is a good thing. It speaks to the way these networks are designed and to the user experience — that it is tapping into something fundamentally human in the way we connect.

However, that’s not enough. That stance assumes that the children involved also have the life experience necessary to recognize the boundaries of social norms, to handle bullying, to process peer pressure for what it is.

I posted this video last month in my effort to figure out where the lines are. I am depressed to say that most parents have never given this the first thought, and they should.

,

Some chastised me for being “behind the times,” because some schools are requiring children this young to have a Twitter account FOR LEARNING. (When it comes to the application of technology to journalism, non-profits, or my present industry, I believe my track record screams anything but “Luddite.”)

So please help us work through this together. Watch the video, and share your thoughts in the comments.

Is your mind changed, one way or another?

Given the emphasis on technology in schools (iPads and Chromebooks and the like), should there be more training around Social Media?

What should that training entail?

Are we sending the wrong message by encouraging kids and parents to violate a TOS?

Is this a clarion call to Twitter and Facebook to develop kid-friendly sandboxes their parents and teachers can oversee?

Is Ike just a raving fuddy-duddy who is destined to be kicked to the curb of history?

]]>https://socialmediaexplorer.com/media-journalism/social-media-and-pre-teens/feed/022955Flipboard as Your Monster Sharing Hubhttps://socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/flipboard-as-your-monster-sharing-hub/
https://socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/flipboard-as-your-monster-sharing-hub/#commentsWed, 25 Sep 2013 10:00:32 +0000http://socialmediaexp.wpengine.com/?p=22616Maybe you’ve seen Flipboard as that gimmicky iPad reader. Maybe you’ve played with it a little bit, but got away from it before you made it a real habit. Maybe you do enjoy just kicking back...read more

]]>Maybe you’ve seen Flipboard as that gimmicky iPad reader. Maybe you’ve played with it a little bit, but got away from it before you made it a real habit. Maybe you do enjoy just kicking back and flipping through content — after all, that’s what most people do with tablets anyway.

So what if I told you that Flipboard made a couple of tweaks recently that make it a serious consideration for your business?

The New Wave of Sharing

Flipboard had a huge hurdle to overcome: Who cares about sharing in an app that only a handful of people use very often anyway?

The solution came from “unbundling” the simpler tasks that we think of when it comes to “sharing” something:

Snagging

Routing

Context

Subscription

Ideally, if you’ve thought about a curation strategy at all, you understand that you don’t have to create metric tons of awesome content if you can be the go-to person to find it and share it. Certain topics lend themselves to a lot of information, and your value as the sifter of the wheat from the chaff is not to be overlooked.

So what is Flipboard doing that is so special? It has moved beyond the app, into categorization, collection and personalization.

Here’s what that workflow can look like:

Sharing Starts Where You Find Things

You find cool things in the browser – so that’s where you need to begin. It would be tedious to copy the link, email it to yourself, open the app, then Share. Instead, you can do it from a little bookmark:

This example is from Chrome, but you can configure the same experience in a tablet browser if that’s where you are reading. Again, the simplicity here is that you can start the moment you identify the content as useful.

Once you click, a pop-up window emerges to allow you to “route” the link.

Notice that you have two levels of sharing to think about here: The top line is the Custom Magazine you’re going to Flip this story into — the lower left is your connected social accounts. Level one is for the people on Flipboard, Level two is open to everyone.

More Channels is Better

My first magazine, Ponderous Wonders, was born of my desire to share cool photos and articles. But as it turns out, not everything I found that was share-worthy matched that label. You want your collections to make sense, because readers can subscribe to them independently.

I also found, at times, that I just didn’t have the time to read an entire piece before sharing. So I created a private magazine where I could Flip things for future consumption.

Sell the Sizzle AND the Steak

So back to the Jason Falls piece on Viral things…

The art of flipping articles is remembering that readers are going to see the title as well as your comment. So you want something that is complementary, not repetitive:

As you can see, I have put this in my Clear Business Thoughts magazine, and I am goosing it through all of my connected social accounts. It’s what happens when it gets to those social accounts that becomes special.

Friction-Free Sharing

Notice how this looks coming through Twitter:

The link will open in Flipboard for those who have it — but if it detects that you don’t, you can always look at the preview and go straight to the source. No one is left out of the experience:

Over time, you may end up convincing some people to actually download the app. And that is exactly where you want them.

On the Flip Side

Within Flipboard, you can create as many Magazines as you need:

You can edit them either within the app, or on a standard desktop browser:

And the Holy Grail of this whole exercise is to build a base of people who are subscribing directly to a channel — from which they are quite likely to re-share your information:

The Big Picture

This stands to be an excellent play for businesses who differentiate themselves based on customer education. I might not buy brakes or air conditioners very often — but I might be inclined to buy them from people who took the time to educate me along the way.

If you’re a coffee shop, with a decent knowledge of your local customer base, then you could really score with this sort of tactic. You could have a string of magazines with reading suggestions, local events, music, art — oh, and news about coffee blends.

This could be the ticket for a busy entrepreneur with limited time for writing and “thought leadership,” but who is enough of a topical consumer of links that filtering and sharing can become second-nature.

What Flipboard has done is made the acts of sharing, compiling, and curation as frictionless and as inclusive as ever. And being able to target specific networks in isolation or in bulk is a time-saver.

]]>https://socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/flipboard-as-your-monster-sharing-hub/feed/1122616The Fourth Question Has Changedhttps://socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/the-fourth-question-has-changed/
https://socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/the-fourth-question-has-changed/#commentsWed, 17 Jul 2013 10:00:16 +0000http://socialmediaexp.wpengine.com/?p=21727This is a strange time for marketers. So many of the fundamental metrics that have been essential to the business have been rendered either meaningless or less meaningful. The definition of “audience” has changed, and...read more

]]>This is a strange time for marketers. So many of the fundamental metrics that have been essential to the business have been rendered either meaningless or less meaningful. The definition of “audience” has changed, and the math now reflects niches and behavior and tracking to a degree that is as useful as it is maddening.

Some consultants will tell you that if you create great content, you don’t have to worry as much. And they used to be right. The successful marketers have injected added value to their messages – some opting for humor, some for utility, others for sheer journalistic weight. But the recipe for great content isn’t as easy as just adding butter (and given Paula Deen’s woes, butter might be the only entity that hasn’t cut ties with her.)

Still, there are some basic steps that you can walk through to ensure you aren’t entirely losing your way. Ask yourself:

1) Who am I talking to?

This is half reflection and half recognition. Who is your intended target for this message, and who else might end up seeing it? Important questions, because if you have a lot of the latter, maybe your venue isn’t as tightly focused as you need. From a sheer messaging standpoint, however, simply closing your eyes and visualizing your audience does wonders as a touchstone, keeping you in harmony with your original intent.

2) What do I want them to know?

Again, this is a rather elementary idea, but you’d be surprised how often a marketer can get swept along with the allure of a killer creative concept, and the information gets cast aside. How many commercials air during the Super Bowl — where, by the way, people are indeed paying attention to the ads — and the viewers can’t even recall the product. “Neitchze-quoting ferrets” might be the ad you loved the most, but if you don’t associate the clever impulse with Pop Secret, then your popcorn purchases aren’t going to change.

3) How do I want them to feel?

Tone. Tone tone tone. It’s the bane of those who get stuck on Question #2, because if you’re all about the facts then tone doesn’t matter, right? Tone is the reason emails fail, it’s the reason blog posts and Facebook posts and Tweets fail. It’s the funny when it shouldn’t be, and the stilted when everyone is relaxed. Tone is the non-verbal aspects of the communication that aren’t as important as when you’re face-to-face — but important nonetheless.

Those three questions have been the vital launching point of any strategic undertaking. They aren’t all-inclusive, and there are many other things you ought to consider. But I got a lot of mileage from starting there, returning there at mid-point, and then using that list as the benchmark to ensure I was getting what I wanted.

Then, because results matter, I felt compelled to add the Fourth Question:

4) What do you want them to do?

In any true marketing campaign, this would have been clearly defined from the beginning. But asking it at the end wraps everything up in a bow, and gives you the solid ground from which to measure the eﬀectiveness of your philosophizing rodents. “Do we want people to buy more Pop Secret? Or do we want to get Reddenbacher consumers to give us a try?”

Again — the above seems like a no-brainer. But I would say that is becoming the wrong question. Instead, ask it this way:

4) What will they do with this information?

If you’re not listening, you will miss this.

In my day job, we use social media channels to communicate with customers and the news media during big storms. We have a fairly good feel for our customers and what they want, and we have indeed been providing that. They want to know when their power will be back after the storm.

In the past, they could call our outage hotline and get an estimate. With the rise of Twitter and Facebook, we now have customers reaching out through mobile devices and asking us through the networks in which they are comfortable. While this has required a fair amount of training and internalizing on our part, we are getting there. The customer asks, gets an answer, and they are happy to know.

Then, just a couple of months ago, their behavior shifted.

No longer content to get their estimated restore time, they are now taking to social networks to share them with the world. And the world is amplifying it further. In some instances, they flag local meteorologists and news personalities with large audiences, to proclaim the good news that “@Anchorlady, power will be back by noon Wednesday in Mooreville!”

Our only quibble is that the pronouncement is not accurate. The forecast for noon Wednesday was for her house. Not the entire city, or even neighborhood. We have many subdivisions where the people across the street are on a completely diﬀerent circuit!

This became a nightmare of failed expectations — and to make things worse, they weren’t our expectations. It was our customers, as well-meaning as they could be, who were confusing each other and setting false deadlines for satisfaction.

Nowhere had it occurred to us that our customers would start doing this. And in a couple of years of using the channels, they had not until recently. We realized this wasn’t a social media issue, per se, because the customer might get the information on the phone, and then Tweet away. This was a matter of more clearly setting the expectation with the customer, and hoping we could get them to understand what that information represents (and what it doesn’t.)

You can’t fault someone for trying to be helpful. But you do need to consider that fourth question: What will they do with this information?

In the past, an audience could only do what receivers could: Listen or Ignore. Purchase or Not. And, of course, tell a friend. And that is the new wrinkle. “Telling a friend” can now become “Telling 3,000 friends” all at once… and if one of those listening is a broadcaster with an itchy retweet finger…

The fourth question has changed. Maybe for you, it’s the sixth question, or Question Number Two. But it has changed, because our audience isn’t passively consuming anymore. They are talking back to you, and talking to each other. Use to your advantage if you can, but ignore at your peril — because it isn’t about you anymore.

]]>https://socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/the-fourth-question-has-changed/feed/321727The Most Bogus Metrichttps://socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-measurement/the-most-bogus-metric-2/
https://socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-measurement/the-most-bogus-metric-2/#commentsFri, 26 Apr 2013 10:00:48 +0000http://socialmediaexp.wpengine.com/?p=20391I love Twitter. I really do. Even when I have a beef with it, I recognize that it is an amazing tool connecting people and businesses and cultures and organizations and thoughts and ideas and...read more

]]>I love Twitter. I really do. Even when I have a beef with it, I recognize that it is an amazing tool connecting people and businesses and cultures and organizations and thoughts and ideas and revolutionaries. And it was built by a small conclave of guys who had no idea what it would grow up to be.

But there is a gap in our measurements, and it’s one that Twitter might make some real money while fixing the most bogus metric of all.

Blind Man’s Bluff

When you send out a batch of marketing emails, you know an awful lot about your audience. You know how many addresses were on that list — how many bounced — how many went unopened — how many converted, etc. You have a clear picture of what works and what doesn’t, and can do nice A/B testing to figure out some ironclad behaviorally-based guidelines. (Many of those crappy-looking webpages you come across at the end of a sales pitch look exactly that way because they work. Pretty doesn’t pay the bills.)

With Twitter, you have something called “Potential Reach.” The Potential Reach of a Tweet is defined as the theoretical maximum number of users who might have encountered it within their timelines. (Let’s ignore aggregate and unique instances for the moment.)

A Tweet from an account with 50,000 followers, in theory, would get 100-times the exposure of an account with 500. There are still other variables at play, like how focused that audience is on your topic, how many accounts those people are all following, time of day… it gets rather messy.

And it doesn’t have to.

You see, all of the metrics that marketing folks have at their disposal are dependent upon assuming apples equal apples in Potential Reach. You compare engagement numbers for various messages. You use link shorteners with Google Analytics campaign codes to slice and dice every last bit of divination as to the effectiveness. You Tweet at 4pm on a Monday, and 4pm on a Tuesday, and you see a five-percent difference, so one day is obviously better, right?

Well, it is if you think Potential Reach is a constant.

What Twitter Isn’t Selling You Yet

The dirty little secret that Twitter isn’t sharing is just how many people did “see” it. The current menu of Promoted offerings will measure engagement: Clicks, Retweets, Follows. But it doesn’t tell the truly data-driven marketer what she wants to know:

How many of my followers accessed the API to receive my Tweet?

Think of the feature that Facebook offers in Groups, that allows you to see how many people have seen a post. For Twitter, that might be an expensive proposition for coding and architecture and bandwidth, but from a data standpoint, it’s not something that has to be delivered in real time. (Facebook’s analytics for its pages are notoriously slow.)

Let’s suppose a particular Tweet – sent to my potential audience of 50,000 – was only accessed by 325 users. (I might get all frowny about the seemingly low number.) I could compare a number of Tweets over time and learn when my audience is “awake.” I could frame questions of effectiveness with regard to percentages instead of a flat metric.

Solving Two Problems

It’s all about the Clicks, you say? I totally agree. But maybe a lot of what you think drives those clicks is just wrong? What if an average message got the fluky benefit of a high spike in Real Reach, and tested better than a superior message? What if you tweaked your writing based on inaccurate assumptions?

It’s a classic statistical dilemma, trying to solve for two factors at the same time. And it is unnecessary, if Twitter gets smart.

So, Twitter: Sell us the analytics to truly know what got seen, and what didn’t. Charge a very pretty penny for it. Charge by the month, and make it steep, because firms will use that month to get a lot better about how they use Twitter for marketing. They will know when their users are really plugged in, and know which messages better resonate. That will be better for them, better for the userbase, and better for your own Promoted Products.

]]>https://socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-measurement/the-most-bogus-metric-2/feed/720391Threads That Entangle Your Crisis Communicationshttps://socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/threads-that-entangle-your-crisis-comms/
https://socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/threads-that-entangle-your-crisis-comms/#commentsFri, 19 Apr 2013 10:00:01 +0000http://socialmediaexp.wpengine.com/?p=20396Facebook is rolling out its Threaded Comments for brand pages, and on the surface it seems to be a great tool for engagement. However, not everything that is good for the one makes sense for...read more

]]>Facebook is rolling out its Threaded Comments for brand pages, and on the surface it seems to be a great tool for engagement.

However, not everything that is good for the one makes sense for the many.

A friend recently flagged me while watching the stream of Tweets coming from a conference, wondering if my eyebrow would do similar gymnastics. The rather innocuous advice being offered revolved around social media communications in a crisis:

“You need to engage the customers one on one, and answer each rumor or comment individually.”

That is not a verbatim, but it is close. It is also very close to driving your sanity – and your company – into the ground.

The word “crisis” has been abused in social media. Remember the Applebee’s “crisis?” It wasn’t much of a blip, even after Applebee’s did some ill-advised things. Remember that Motrin thing? Google it. Remember that one where the company said something dumb and someone got offended and the Consumerist post was linked by Mashable?

In the everyday world of social media, businesses ought to be friendly. If you’ve got the time and the bandwidth to greet your customers like the humans that you are, that’s fantastic. “Facebook is your Digital Lobby,” my friend David Griner would say.

But when you have a bona fide crisis — one that impacts your stock price, or halts trading altogether — one that dominates every headline in your sector or even the popular press — one that highlights a real disconnect between your actions and the promises you’ve made to your customers… you aren’t in the feelgood business.

Gamechanger Events Also Change the Rules

The value of social channels changes drastically in a crisis. Yes, you need a real-time and nimble forum for sharing your message. Yes, you need to maintain a constant push of information, because the moment you stay silent too long your detractors will fill the vacuum and set the agenda for you. But the real value of social channels in a crisis is in listening and intelligence.

When you detect that certain words are now trending along with mentions, or that some questions are suddenly showing up on your Wall, that is valuable information that needs to plug into your messaging strategy. When a rumor starts getting some wind behind it, you don’t attack the messengers! You take away the wind! Answering every single person is a nice gesture, but it is doomed to fail because you aren’t maximizing your time. Use that human resource to better purposes.

Which gets us back to Facebook…

Threads Fray With Loose Ends

The threaded comments are wonderful for one-to-one engagement. In a real crisis, they bog you down, and leave a lot of loose ends hanging. You’ve created the expectation that answers will come, and you won’t be in a position to deliver.

In a crisis, Flat comment streams may give you more bang for your buck. Facebook defaults to show the most recent 50 comments, which means that if your dip back into the line every 30 comments or so your response will be there and visible. The format forces you to be more general in your responses, which helps with focus on the big picture.

Do you want to toggle between the two? Not sure how that will work for your company, nor for the third-party tools you might be using.

New features are fine, and they are inevitable as social networks attempt to meet expectations and stave off future competitors. But just keep in mind that not every change works to your benefit, and unintended consequences abound.

]]>https://socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/threads-that-entangle-your-crisis-comms/feed/420396Some Solutions to Social Media Hijackinghttps://socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/some-solutions-to-social-media-hijacking/
https://socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/some-solutions-to-social-media-hijacking/#commentsFri, 01 Mar 2013 11:00:43 +0000http://socialmediaexp.wpengine.com/?p=18872The recent hacking of two major brand accounts (Burger King and Jeep) should have prompted some conversations and concern among those of you who manage a Twitter account for your brand. Whether you’re a Fortune...read more

]]>The recent hacking of two major brand accounts (Burger King and Jeep) should have prompted some conversations and concern among those of you who manage a Twitter account for your brand. Whether you’re a Fortune 500 multinational or a local small business armed with Tweetdeck and a prayer, it’s time to do some deeper thinking about security.

The Good News First

Fortunately, for both Jeep and Burger King, no permanent damage was done to their reputation or the value of their respective brands.

Twitter issued a security fix!

The Bad News

The lack of lasting effects served to drop this off the radar for those who might have a stake in reputation management, and “out of sight” generally translates to “out of mind” on things we really don’t understand.

The “fix” Twitter announced only covers a small subset of the vulnerabilities.

How Accounts Get Hacked

Just like any other social network that involves password security, Twitter accounts get compromised in several different ways. If you have ever received a Direct Message from someone that looks like this:

OMG! Did you know they had this video of you?? (malware link)

I can’t believe the things they are saying about you on this blog (malware link)

HAHAHA how old were you in this picture? (malware link)

This is good old-fashioned human engineering at play, designed to amp your curiosity and get you to click. Once you do, the site at the end of the trail of link-shorteners drops some javascript on you, and depending on the security of your browser it may broadcast itself to your friends through your account. (Which typically means that moments before you get that DM, the sender clicked that very link…)

In the past, Twitter has told people affected by those malware links to change their passwords, as a precaution. It’s hard to know for sure if your password was snagged, but better safe than sorry, and I am not about to doubt the ingenuity of a hacker’s ability to pull it over the net.

But not all hijackings involve links. Often, it is a failure to protect the email address associated with the account. If you’re hesitant about strong passwords because you can’t remember them, and limited memory, then save the strong stuff for your mail accounts. The password to your email is often the keys to the kingdom. Say that out loud with me. The password to your email is often the keys to the kingdom. From there, you can get anywhere. Twitter, Facebook, bank accounts, your Dropbox… just, wow.

Your email is under attack all the time, by the way. You laugh off most of them, because it’s so obvious that you don’t have an account with Royal Bank of Scotland, and Citi, and eBay, and PayPal, and Wells Fargo, and waitaminit I do have some of those. We laugh at the ones that are so obviously not meant for us that we might fall for the others.

Let’s say for a moment that I wanted to be a complete jerk and hack the Twitter account for Social Media Explorer. I could try the brute force hack, but that would be empty and time-consuming. Or, I could simply scrape the web for email addresses associated with SME, and then send them an email that says:

FROM: Corp Email Security

SUBJECT: Potential hacking

We’ve recently learned about attempts to improperly access the SME.com email server. We’re on top of things, but just want to ensure safe delivery of our findings. Please log in to your email below to authenticate. Thanks.

Now, we haven’t heard the specifics of how Jeep and Burger King got hacked, but emails similar to the one above were circulating a month or so ago. Wouldn’t surprise me in the least if the email accounts of a brand manager or two got snared in something like this.

Twitter’s Fix Is Incomplete

Twitter announced action less than a day after Jeep’s episode, but it isn’t enough. Essentially, Twitter is using a more robust security protocol in the sending of its official notification emails: the Daily Digest, the New Followers, the You Got a Direct Message… So if I tried getting your Twitter password by spoofing a Twitter email address, it would be more easily recognized as fake. But that does nothing for the person whose email account is compromised completely!

“But Ike,” you say… “Ike, that’s not Twitter’s problem. That’s on you.” And you’re right. But there is a very simple step Twitter ought to take that would make brand managers more secure. It’s called Two-Step Authentication, and you probably already use it. It involves a secondary step anytime a critical account change is requested. If you want to change the password, or the account name, or the email address associated with the account — it makes you jump through an additional hoop. It might be a challenge question, or could be a text message to a cell phone you’ve associated with that account. Essentially, the Two-Step foils many associated attacks.

(If you feel like Twitter ought to make this available, why not speak up in the comments below, and tell us which brands you represent. Ad-hoc petition for the win.)

But if you can’t wait for that to happen…

Best Practices for Hack Avoidance

Change passwords often

Be extra-wary of any email that asks for one, or gives you a link to sign in

Train your team on how to recognize malware link-jacks

Use a hidden email address

That last one bears some explaining.

If I want to take a stab at getting the SME Twitter password, I can try phishing for the email address associated with the account. But if the Twitter handle is registered to ZaphodDaleks20xd6@SME.com, then I probably won’t find it. And if that email address is used for nothing else, I won’t know it exists.

As a best practice, your email addresses for your social accounts should not be your regular address. Use an alias. Set a rule that forwards the email from ZaphodDaleks20xd6@SME.com to the address you regularly check. But don’t tie it to a personal address. (If you represent a brand big enough to have a “team,” this is a great idea anyway so you can avoid the issues that arise when a team-member leaves the company.)

Most importantly, have a plan. Know the process for initiating a password reset, and go ahead and assemble a Cheat Sheet of who you would need to alert for each of the networks you’re using. You will never be hack-proof, but the above steps will make you a harder target, at least until Twitter and Pinterest and others step up their own game with Two-Step Authentication.

]]>https://socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/some-solutions-to-social-media-hijacking/feed/1518872Livefyre Torched As Spam – Are You Next?https://socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/livefyre-torched-as-spam-are-you-next/
https://socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/livefyre-torched-as-spam-are-you-next/#commentsFri, 18 Jan 2013 11:00:49 +0000http://socialmediaexp.wpengine.com/?p=17844Comment and engagement systems are all the rage, but they are only as useful as they are available. Ike Pigott weighs in with a battle at the front in the war between open engagement and security.

]]>Words like “Engagement” and “Conversation” have been drilled down to the point of self-parody. Anyone putting together a Social Media Bingo Card would be foolish to ignore them — and in some businesses, those words represent real business. So much so that there is an entire industry built around comment management and making the activity around online interactions as “sticky” as possible.

There are several commenting platforms you can chose from: Disqus, Livefyre , IntenseDebate and Echo, just to name a few. They sit on top of your blog or website, and not only provide tools for community managers but also make sharing easy. I know many people who use Livefyre, and they swear by the engagement that comes in. When a person comments, they have a quick option to share that through or social network, with a shortlink leading directly to that comment.

But the system isn’t going to fare well if that shortlink is categorized as Spam.

IT Holds The Cards

Recently, I tried clicking on a link from the frye.it domain, and our corporate firewall blocked it. More specifically, the third-party vendor providing us that real-time blacklist of spam links blocked it. As I often do, I filed a report with them, indicating that this was a legitimate link domain.

The response:

Hello again –

We have reviewed http://fyre.it and determined that it does not need to be changed at this time based on BrightCloud’s classification criteria.

It is currently classified as SPAM URLs in the BrightCloud Service and available in Database version 4.25.

You can read our Database Change FAQs for more information on the most common reasons why your suggestion may not have been implemented.

Thanks again for your suggestion!
– BrightCloud Team

This is a bad classification, on a number of levels.

First, as far as I know, there is no “public portal” where one can make custom fyre.it links. Spammers killed Tinyurl, and have all the access they need to the API of bit.ly to create spam. But you can’t make a fyre.it link without actually leaving a comment somewhere.

That’s the other piece that doesn’t make sense. All of the links end up pointing directly to comments on someone’s carefully-maintained site. They don’t go elsewhere. Sure, a spammer can leave a spam comment with a spam link in the comment, but the Livefyre shortlink only goes to the comment.

As you can see, my explanation fell on deaf ears. But there are many other companies facing similar issues with link shorteners. Some domains really are hit and miss, depending on the whims of the day.

No Incentive To Fix

This problem isn’t new, per se, but just a rehash of older conversations about blacklisting servers that send spam. We used to have my father’s business on a shared hosting plan, but had to scramble for alternatives because a lot of his email wasn’t getting through. The aggressive Spam Filters flagged the entire server for the actions of a few, and they really don’t have an incentive to fix anything.

If you’re a company selling your blacklist spam protection, it is a selling point to a corporate IT liaison that “We block 300,000 domains, while the other guys block just 100,000.” Of course that sounds better, and more secure. But does anyone ever ask if some of those domains are directly tied to the industry you’re in? That this is impeding a free flow of information with business purposes?

I am pleased that companies like Brightcloud and Websense are attempting to crowdsource their designations. They are wise to allow users to help shape and classify the database of what is truly helpful versus what it run over with spam. But at the end of the day, they still hold all the cards, and that’s just a fact of online life for the providers of third-party solutions.

For all I know, there are serious black-hat games being waged, with competing comment platforms trying to get the others flagged for competitive advantage. It’s not an expensive thing to do. I just wish the blacklist industry had a better grasp of what is happening on the modern web and was a bit more transparent about how they draw the line. At the very least, consider this yet another warning that when you build sandcastles on someone else’s beach, you have more than the tides to worry about.

UPDATE

LiveFyre has now successfully appealed to Brightcloud, and the shortlinks are now whitelisted.

]]>https://socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/livefyre-torched-as-spam-are-you-next/feed/2117844What Charter Doesn’t Understand About Social Mediahttps://socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-monitoring/what-charter-doesnt-understand-about-social-media/
https://socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-monitoring/what-charter-doesnt-understand-about-social-media/#commentsThu, 13 Dec 2012 11:24:35 +0000http://socialmediaexp.wpengine.com/?p=16990Charter Communications, which has been lauded for its stellar customer service over social media, is pulling the plug on those channels. Ike Pigott weighs in on how this will impact the landscape.

]]>In a move that surprised even the most jaded customer, Charter abruptly pulled the plug on its social media customer service team. But why? A brief statement from the company:

“We believe speaking directly with a customer is a more personal, effective and consistent way to answer questions, solve an issue or provide information, and we will focus our efforts on these means of communications. We’re committed to treating our customers with great care, and we believe that person-to-person interaction accomplishes that in a more meaningful way for more of our customers.”

…and some analysis from SME’s Ike Pigott:

Is this proof that social just can’t scale for customer care? Is the cost too high? Or is there something else happening here? Please share your reactions (and theories) in the comments.

(Especially if you work for Charter, and have some inside scoop. Identities withheld.)

]]>Ike… you’re crazy, man! The whole purpose of social media is being social, right? Why would you have a blog and not share it with anyone?

Great question. So let’s answer that by going back to the roots of the word “blog.”

Blog = (we)blog, or “web log.” Technically speaking, a blog is any online tool that you update frequently. Preferably, it has built-in resources and features that make updates easy. There’s nothing inherent in that definition that assumes “community,” or “comments,” or for that matter, “visibility.”

So here are some reasons you ought to keep on offline blog:

1. Win over more internal skeptics

In larger organizations where it takes time to generate acceptance to change, you want to be in a position to win over those who are wary. My experience tells me that you can bang your head against the brick wall of organizational inertia, or you can wait for the moment where the audience is receptive. You never have control of that, but what you can be is ready for that moment.

Long before my company really dove into social in a programmatic and strategic fashion, I had been collecting screenshots and links of good social interactions. Twitter, Facebook, blogs and online news site comments. You need to have a repository for those examples – one that’s available to you, and one that is searchable. For that use, I relied on Evernote. (Yes, Evernote is not considered a blogging platform, but for this purpose how is it any different than a private WordPress site?)

Evernote became wonderful with this for two key reasons — offline access to those examples, and the image engine which allows you to find keywords in images and .pdf files. When that executive shows a sudden interest, I have at my fingertips a relevant example.

2. Document key wins

Nothing brings a grin like helping a customer via a social channel, particularly when you get them to turn a complete 180 about how they regard your brand. Don’t let those examples fade into search engine obscurity – document them.

We run a no-comment blog for our media relations department, just to host longer explanations and media that wouldn’t be as useful on Twitter or Facebook alone. We are currently using Posterous.com as our back-end for that, and there is a nifty feature you can exploit for this purpose. Say you have an event, like last week’s superstorm. You are collecting positive interactions, and want it to be curated and available in realtime. Posterous allows for private links, which is essentially the same as an Unlisted video on YouTube. It’s only as public as the link that is shared. In this case, we can simply post the URLs of great Tweets, and Posterous automatically renders them in a pleasing way. I can give that link to the executive leadership, knowing that I can add more to it later. (and they certainly look better than when copied into an email.

3. Remind you of Human Voice

By keeping that running log of good and bad, we can use the tagging features to highlight examples of “human voice.” There will always be reasons why you would use a company name instead of a human presence on a corporate account, but that doesn’t mean you have to talk with people like you’re an inanimate building. Having a legacy of talking a certain way online makes it easier to stay consistent in your voice.

4. Training of new people on the accounts

Every company faces the challenge of continuity. As social business scales, you will need more people proficient in monitoring, posting, responding and analyzing. It’s far easier to bring a new team member up to speed when you can show what you’ve done in the past. Internal blogs are great for this, because the discussion/comment features allow for lively debate and teaching moments. “Why did you do it that way?” becomes an answer not just for that employee, but for every employee who encounters the same idea 8 months later.

5. Mine your history for existing answers

When you have that backlog handy, you don’t need to spend as much time drafting If-Then flowcharts and protocols. Nor do you have to make up every answer from scratch. The vast majority of customer questions have been asked before — but not everyone on your social team might instinctively know which answer to use, and how best to post it. Public? Private? Unlisted? Phone call?

This is a big issue for customer care organizations, because social channels give them far more leeway and gray area in deciding how to complete a transaction. In some cases, customer service reps have never been empowered to make that decision — when a customer walks through the door or calls the hotline, the engagement is initiated. Not always the case in social. But if you’ve got concrete examples to share, you can build in a level of consistency to your efforts.

Bottom Line

Odds are, you are probably doing a lot of the above already, but you had not considered that activity as “blogging.” You really should. More than anything else, this is an exercise in finding the right tool for the job. The people and companies that excel in social media have their success because they look at these tools and resources for what they are and what they do — and not just how everyone else considers them.

]]>https://socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing-training/five-reasons-to-blog-offline/feed/1116489The Reporter’s Guide to Customer Experiencehttps://socialmediaexplorer.com/digital-marketing/the-reporters-guide-to-customer-experience/
https://socialmediaexplorer.com/digital-marketing/the-reporters-guide-to-customer-experience/#commentsWed, 22 Aug 2012 13:00:21 +0000http://socialmediaexp.wpengine.com/?p=14841Customer communication, whether in social media marketing or other channels, can be best optimized by continually asking the important questions a reporter would ask about a story.

]]>Congratulations! You did all the hard work, studied your options and embarked on a social media program for your company. You’ve already accomplished the second most-difficult part of maintaining a social presence that will keep your customers informed and engaged. The hardest part?

The rest.

We often got lost in the bright and shiny glare of the tool-of-the-day, and lose track of what’s important.

Now that you’ve launched, you need to take a critical eye and examine what seems to be working and what isn’t. And while there are so many variables for small/medium/enterprise and retail/service that a checklist isn’t really viable, there is a way to make sure you’re asking all the right questions about how you are maintaining your program.

Think like a journalist. Re-focusing is just this easy:

Who are we trying to communicate to?

What do they want to talk about?

Where are they going to be receiving this information?

When are we delivering it?

Why should they care about receiving it from us?

How will we deliver it?

Who

Think for a moment about your customer base, potential customer pool, and other organizational stakeholders. Have they changed? Have you been surprised in some fashion about either higher or lower adoption/engagement than you had anticipated?

Most importantly, have you generated any engagement with a group of people that you had not intended? This could be a clue that maybe your content isn’t focused where you need to be — or maybe that you have an audience to cultivate that you have simply been ignoring.

What

Often, you don’t get a lot of feedback about what is not working. People who are not connected to you don’t have the emotional investment to leave you detailed complaints, and when you consider the very high percentages of site visitors who do not comment, that’s a lot of potential wasted.

Are you asking them what they would like to know? Are you running the occasional survey? Even better, are you tracking their behavior once they are on your site? Following the breadcrumbs of site visits can be instructive — but maybe the best thing you can do is simply ask people. Go back a few months to those who have commented, and reach out with a personal request. Ask them if they still come by, and if they don’t what you’d need to supply to make it worth their while.

What? You don’t get any comments at all? Well, that’s a signal right there…

Where

With the explosion of mobile devices, you really need to know more about where your content is being consumed. Are you simply casting your seeds everywhere, hoping that some will find fertile ground? Or are you spending more of your time and energy cultivating fields that are more likely to develop leads and sales?

This is the hidden secret of the location-based services — it let’s you identify your mobile customers, and gives you an opportunity to develop a more personal relationship with them. Not because you want to “treat the Mayor” or give them overtly special treatment — but so you can find out more about their habits:

How many other places do you “check in?”

What’s your motive for “checking in?”

How many of your friends act on Tips?

What were the last three apps you used or mobile websites you visited before walking in here?

That last one is bolded for a reason. You can learn a lot from where your customers have been. Absent the ability to track them, simply ask them.

When

Giving potential customers information too early is almost as bad as giving it to them too late. This complements the “Where” proposition above, because the right pitch gets magnified in effectiveness when delivered at the right place at the right time. Much in the same way we can use Google Analytics to track the effectiveness of different channels or campaigns, you can experiment with the lead time of your offers. After a while, go back and see which factors mattered. It may just be that your conventional wisdom about when to pitch an offer was off by a day or two in one direction. (Or, when combined with a location-based punch, hours.)

Why

This is one of the easiest to address, but it also slips away from us if we aren’t vigilant. As writers become more comfortable creating for the web and for email and for blogs and for tweets, there’s a tendency to get too cute. Yes, there are some very clever phrasings and drop-dead funny pictures and funny jokes that simply don’t translate into effective marketing.

This isn’t just the Super Bowl commercial that was so clever that no one could remember what it was about — this is the little things, like remembering to include a value proposition, or a call to action. It’s amazing how important some of those seemingly repetitive words and phrases can be.

How

How are you delivering your content? Are you using the right platform? Is your audience starting to do something else? Are you updating regularly, engaging like a human being where warranted? Are you offering different facets of the same message through parallel channels? Or are you simply auto-posting from one to another, and in the process clogging up customer streams with soggy Xerox copies of what could have been a compelling message?

Take a moment to look at what your customers are getting. Emails, Facebook posts, Tweets. Maybe your Twitter client stopped rendering your photos a couple of months ago — would you know? Is your Facebook copy showing up in the description or in the post? Has the formatting of your email broken? You’ve got to know.

Six simple questions — Who What Where When Why and How — which will ensure you’re being thorough in your review of your social success.

]]>https://socialmediaexplorer.com/digital-marketing/the-reporters-guide-to-customer-experience/feed/1214841How Long Should Your Blog Post Be?https://socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/how-long-should-your-blog-post-be/
https://socialmediaexplorer.com/social-media-marketing/how-long-should-your-blog-post-be/#commentsFri, 20 Jul 2012 13:00:33 +0000http://socialmediaexp.wpengine.com/?p=13902Ike Pigott explains how long your blog posts should be, (In almost as few words as this description.)

]]>Lately, I’ve seen a lot of people asking this question. The answer varies quite a bit, so let me be more definitive.

A blog post is as long as you need it to be to make your point, and no more.

But what about the search engines? What about the research about most clicked posts?

Forget them. They measured content that you didn’t write, for people who you don’t care about. It’s like averaging the height of the top 100 chess Grandmasters, and telling you that the optimum player is 5′ 7″.